Not Quite Hatfields and McCoys, But Still Pretty Bloody

The New York Times wrote about the Turner-Howard feud in 1889.

Well, I certainly didn't expect to uncover a new piece of family history while reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, but that's exactly what just happened. Outliers is Gladwell's attempt to explain what makes people successful. As the back cover puts it, "we should look at the world that surrounds the successful—their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing." (I'm just halfway through the book, and it's really fascinating. I'd recommend it.)

To illustrate how centuries-old cultural traits shape people to this day, Gladwell talks about one of my favorite subjects, the Scotch-Irish immigrants whose proud, violent culture was shaped by their experience on the border of England and Scotland. A good half of my ancestry is Scotch-Irish, and some of the stories I've told on this blog reflect that culture of feuding hill-country clans. (Remember how Silas Jones fled Arkansas? The story is here, here, and here.) Gladwell uses as an example a feud between the Howard and Turner families in Harlan County, Kentucky, after the Civil War.

The feud he recounts—between the descendants of William Turner and those of Samuel Howard—went on for years and cost at least a dozen lives. (One account is here; you can read Gladwell's summary on Google Books here.) It started with a dispute over a poker game and escalated with each successive insult to Scotch-Irish honor. At one point, the governor sent troops to the area to protect the courthouse in the midst of the feud, and in 1889, the New York Times published an article about the feud, calling it "a faction war that has cost many lives and still disgraces the state of Kentucky." The main characters on the Turner side were grandsons of the patriarch William Turner: Will, George, and "Devil Jim." As Gladwell puts it succinctly, "These were not pleasant people."

When I saw the name Turner and Harlan County, though, I had to reach for my family history files. And sure enough, the same William Turner described as the patriarch of the feuding family was an ancestor. Born in 1770 in Virginia, William married Susannah Bailey and moved to Harlan County, where he owned a tavern and two general stores. Their daughter Mary Turner married Bales Shumate. They had at least one son, William Shumate, before Mary drowned in the Clover Fork River in 1828. (The family story is that she was going to her sister's house to care for someone who was sick.) A few years later, their son William moved to Arkansas with his wife Sarah and her Ball family; Bales moved to Arkansas at about the same time. William and Sarah were the parents of Bennett Shumate, who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and was Cal Jones's grandfather. (I wrote about the Joneses and Shumates in the Civil War here.)

So although my direct ancestors had moved west some 30 years before the feud began, they were very closely related to the feuding Turners. I hope to learn more about the particulars of the feud and report in future blog posts.

The Vermont Clarks and the Year Without a Summer

I've talked about this before, but the most common theme in my family history is an insistent westward movement over many generations. I've learned enough by now to understand the macro reasons for such movement: people scraping together an existence from the land had to keep looking for new land, and, being poor people, they had to keep looking for land nobody really wanted.

But in the absence of much detailed written or oral history in my family, I've never known much about the events or decisions that may have led anyone in particular to pick up stakes and move. (There are some exceptions, most notably Silas Jones's perceived need to get out of Arkansas in a hurry.)

So it was exciting for me to hear today about the Year Without a Summer in New England in 1816. I heard about this on an episode of Backstory, a terrific public radio show about American history. As they described it, there was crazy snow, cold temperatures, and frozen ground all summer, leading to crop failures and hunger.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was bad news for farmers, but good news for painters of sunsets. J .M. W. Turner's painting Chichester Canal was inspired by the golden sunsets caused by the ashy sky.

It is now understood that the cold weather was largely due to a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before, but no one knew that at the time, and, as the Backstory guys explained, the freak winter caused people to leave Vermont and New Hampshire in great numbers for less settled, warmer places like Ohio and Indiana.

As it happens, my only New England ancestors, John and Marcy Clark (who I've talked about a little before), were married in Vermont in 1810. Eight years later, their son Ambrose was born in Ross County, Ohio. I have no record of when they moved (nor do I have birthdates or birthplaces for any children older than Ambrose) but the timing makes me wonder if they were among the people who fled New England when it seemed that summer would never come again.

Our Cousin in the White House

I read today that President Obama went to Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects to Frank Buckles, who was until last week the last surviving veteran of World War I. Somehow that reminded me that Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham (that's young Barack and his grandfather in the picture), was a veteran of World War II, and that started me off on one of those long serendipitious internet rambles that led me to a satisfying but not-so-surprising discovery: Barack Obama is a cousin to our Jones family.

Specifically, he's Cal Jones's 9th cousin twice removed, or, put another way, Cal was a straight 9th cousin to Stanley Dunham. The first common ancestor is a man by the name of Benois Brasseur (1620–1663), a French Huguenot who came to Maryland some time before 1635. (Huguenots were French Protestants who were persecuted by the Catholic powers-that-were in France; a number of them settled in Canada, New York, and the mid-South in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The Shumate ancestors on the Jones side were also Huguenots; their original surname was de la Chaumette.) The name was gradually anglicized to Brashears, now a common surname in the south.

Benois Brasseur was an ancestor of Stanley Dunham's on his mother's side, and an ancestor of Cal Jones's on his mother's side. (Specifically the line goes through Cal's mother Nannie Shumate, her father Bennett Shumate, his mother Sarah Ball, her father Bennett Ball, his father Moses Ball, his mother Ann Brashears and then back four more generations to Benois.) And the journey of the future president's family across the continent was not so different from that of Cal's family. Cal's Brasseur/Brashears ancestors moved over several generations from Maryland to Virginia to Kentucky to Arkansas and finally to Oklahoma. Obama's went from Maryland to Kentucky to Missouri and finally to Kansas. The original French Huguenots married into English and Scots-Irish families and assimilated into the backwoods Appalachian culture that they brought with them as they moved west from one scrubby stand of mountains to the next until they ran out of new woodlands.

I said the discovery was not so suprising, and that's because I've spent enough time looking at American family trees to know that if a piece of your family has been here for 300 years or so, there's a pretty good chance you're related to another American who can say the same. Without trying very hard, I've already discovered that Cal was a 9th cousin to Richard Nixon (through Cal's Quaker great-grandmother) and an 8th cousin once removed to George W. Bush (through his New England great-great-grandparents), and that his great-great-great-great grandfather was a second cousin to James Madison. And if one unconfirmed lineage is to be believed, Cal was a sixth cousin once removed to his own wife Clara. (They both had Quaker ancestors named Mills.)

The ironic thing for me is that while a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to show how foreign Obama is, we forget that half his lineage—and that of the people that raised him—is from that same Scots-Irish Protestant Appalachian culture that has produced the strongest and most vociferous opposition to his presidency. I'll bet his grandfather and mine would have had a lot to talk about.

A Brush With Abe

It's Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial year, so here's the only thing I know about how Lincoln's life intersected with our family's (not counting that whole Civil War that he won). It's not much, but, you know, it's Lincoln.

Cal Jones's great-grandmother (father's mother's mother) was a woman named Salina Hash (you just have to say it with an Arkansas accent), who married Ambrose Clark. Salina was born in Warren County, Tennessee, to Alvin (Josh) Hash and Esther Drake Hash in 1823; family legend holds that her parents moved to Illinois in 1825 so that they might free the slaves that they owned. Whatever the reason, we know from the census that in 1830 the family was living on a farm in Sangamon County, Illinois—the same county to which the young Abraham Lincoln came in 1830. The Hashes lived there until 1836, when they moved to Washington County, Arkansas, where Salina met Ambrose Clark.

I heard the Hashes' Lincoln story from Marian Carter Ledgerwood, a Jones/Shumate cousin who is a well-published family historian. The details of the story vary with the teller, but it was set down in writing by Alvin and Esther's youngest son, Benjamin Franklin Hash. He wrote of his parents: "Abraham Lincoln surveyed their land. He made a mark in the door of the cabin so as to tell when it was twelve o'clock." Others fill in details by explaining that Lincoln was helping out after Esther complained to him that she didn't have a clock.

It is well documented that Lincoln worked as a surveyor in Sangamon County starting in 1833, so this tale is certainly plausible. Too bad the Hashes didn't know what was to become of Lincoln--they might have taken that door with them when they moved to Arkansas.

For what it's worth, Salina and her husband Ambrose Clark ended up being Union sympathizers when the Civil War broke out nearly 30 years later. They took in a wounded Union soldier named Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones after a battle near Fayetteville, and the story goes that Matt fell in love with their raven-haired daughter, Esther Clark. He came back and married her, and they became the parents of Silas Jones and the grandparents of Cal Jones. So I guess some of us have Lincoln's war to thank for our existence!

Crank and Walty

Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish to have. That's the way one should approach family history, too, but I sometimes find myself devoting time and attention to the ancestors I wish I had. I'm not the only one: in years of poking around the internet, I've found wishful and quite erroneous information shoehorning famous people into our family. There was the hopeful family tree that imagined that Daniel Boone's sister was an ancestor of Nannie Shumate, and another that substituted one brother for another in order to bring Mayflower passenger John Alden into Silas Jones's line.

I don't want to make that mistake here, but I can't help telling you about an ancestor that I covet for our tree. George Lamberton was one of the earliest settlers of my adopted hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, which is reason enough for me to want to make that connection. But Lamberton was also central to a legendary episode in the early history of the New Haven Colony -- one that was immortalized in a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Lamberton apparently died at sea in 1646 while captaining a "Great Shippe" that the New Haven colonists had loaded with goods bound for England, hoping to reverse their colony's failing fortunes through profits from the trip. The ship was never seen again. Well, sort of. More about that in a moment.

First I'll tell you a little about where he fits in: I've told you before about Ambrose Clark, the great-grandfather of Cal Jones. Ambrose ended up in Arkansas but was born in Ohio to parents from New England -- the only New Englanders I've found in my family tree. I told you in my last post a little about Ambrose's mother, Marcy Humes. All we know about the origins of his father, John Clark, was that he was born around 1783 in Vermont and married Marcy in Middlesex, Vermont, in 1810.

But I have reason to believe that John ties into a family of Clarks from Connecticut who are descended from George Lamberton. I'm not the only one to think so; a Clark historian in Vermont has also made the connection. But there is no proof and at least one "missing link" between the families. I'll explain all that at the end. Let's get back to the tale of the sea.

So the New Haven Colony (which later merged with Connecticut) was founded in 1638 by English Puritans who had first planned to settle in Massachusetts, but who decided that that colony was both too crowded and insufficiently pious for their purposes. They came instead to a beautiful natural harbor on Long Island Sound, inhabited lightly by friendly Indians, and set about building a colony that would operate strictly under biblical law. They also hoped to make a lot of money, but that proved easier said than done. After some initial attempts at trade and agriculture didn't work out so well, they decided in 1646 that they needed to make a big score. They had a large ship built to sail to England and carry all the crops and merchandise they could produce.

The ship, built in Rhode Island, was the first oceangoing vessel built in the colonies, and it was apparently of dubious seaworthiness. So the man they chose to be its captain. George Lamberton, was either brave or optimistic or burdened with low foresight. George, a former London merchant, was 42 years old; he had come to New Haven with his wife Margaret and four daughters in 1638. The Lambertons had three more daughters before his voyage. (Their names are worth noting: Elizabeth, Hannah, Hope, Deliverance, Mercy, Desire, Obedience.)

George had been involved earlier in another scheme to improve the colony's fortunes: he led a 1641 excursion to Delaware to try to set up an outpost of New Haven for trade, but the party was chased out by the Swedes who had settled there. Along the way, he is said to have purchased the land that later became Phildaelphia from the local Indians -- when he sailed for England, he supposedly had a deed for this purchase with him.

The Great Shippe left New Haven Harbor in January 1646 (as depicted in the painting at left. Sorry it's so small--I'll try to find a bigger one). Colonists had to cut a path for the ship through the ice in the harbor. In addition to Lamberton and the cargo, there were passengers aboard who were going back to England, either permanently or to visit. More than a year went by without word of the ship, which never arrived in England. After a while, the New Haven colonists gave up hoping for their return. Being good Puritans who believed that God had predestined everything, they did not pray for the ship's miraculous return; instead, they asked that God let them know what had happened to the ship and its passengers. The answer came in an apparition in the harbor one afternoon.

Here I should stop trying to tell the story and let Longfellow do it. His 1858 poem, reproduced below, was based on an account by Cotton Mather in 1702.

The Phantom Ship

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In Mather's Magnalia Christi,
Of the old colonial time,
May be found in prose the legend
That is here set down in rhyme.

A ship sailed from New Haven,
And the keen and frosty airs,
That filled her sails at parting,
Were heavy with good men's prayers.

O Lord! if it be thy pleasure--
Thus prayed the old divine--
To bury our friends in the ocean,
Take them, for they are thine!

But Master Lamberton muttered,
And under his breath said he,
This ship is so crank and walty,
I fear our grave she will be!

And the ship that came from England,

When the winter months were gone,
Brought no tidings of this vessel,
Nor of Master Lamberton.

This put the people to praying
That the Lord would let them hear
What in His greater wisdom
He had done with friends so dear.

And at last their prayers were answered:--
It was in the month of June,
An hour before the sunset
Of a windy afternoon,

When, steadily steering landward,
A ship was seen below,
And they knew it was Lamberton, Master,
Who sailed so long ago.

On she came, with a cloud of canvas,
Right against the wind that blew.
Until the eye could distinguish
The faces of the crew.

Then fell her straining topmasts,
Hanging tangled in the shrouds,
And her sails were loosened and lifted,
And blown away like clouds.

And the masts, with all their rigging,
Fell slowly, one by one,
And the hulk dilated and vanished,
As a sea-mist in the sun!

And the people who saw this marvel
Each said unto his friend,
That this was the mould of their vessel,
And thus her tragic end.

And the pastor of the village
Gave thanks to God in prayer,
That, to quiet their troubled spirits,
He had sent this Ship of Air.

Here's a prose version of the Phantom Ship story. And if you really want to go deep into the story, the original telling begins on page 83 of this book from 1702 by Cotton Mather.

So these Puritans could rest easier knowing for sure that their friends and family had died in a shipwreck. One of the lost was the wife of Deputy Governor Stephen Goodyear (ancestor of the man who invented vulcanized rubber). The widowed Margaret Lamberton married the widowed Stephen Goodyear a year later.

What makes me think we might be descendants of George Lamberton? It's all in the name Ambrose. George and Margaret's daughter Hope married Samuel Ambrose, and their daughter Abigail married John Clark. The Clarks ended up in Middletown, Connecticut, up the road from New Haven, and they had a son and several other descendants named Ambrose Clark. If some of these Clarks moved to Vermont -- which is perfectly plausible, as there was much emigration from Connecticut to Vermont in the 18th century -- our John Clark could be one of their descendants, which would explain the origin of "our" Ambrose's name.

The line, with a gaping hole, might look something like this:

George Lamberton (1604–1646) m. Margaret Lewen
Hope Lamberton (ca. 1636–ca. 1700) m. Samuel Ambrose
Abigail Ambrose (1666–1732) m. John Clark
Ambrose Clark (1696–1764) m. Elizabeth Ward
Ambrose Clark (1723–? ) m. Mary Kilbourn
[Missing Link]
John Clark (1783–1850) m. Marcy Humes
Ambrose Clark (1818–1896) m. Salina Hash
Esther Caroline Clark (1848–1922) m. Charles Matthew Jones
Silas Matthew Jones (1871–1940) m. Nancy Lucinda Shumate
Sherman Calaway Jones (1895–1967) m. Clara Paxton

I don't know if we'll ever fill in that missing link. You'd think it would be hard to learn anything new about people who lived 250 years ago, but I hold out hope that someone has information in a family bible or a trunk in the attic that will clear all this up.

There's a classic old map (left, click on it to enlarge) showing the land held by settlers in the nine-block grid of New Haven in 1641. George Lamberton's tract, in the lower left square near the red letter "C," is right across the street from our favorite Chinese restaurant. I think of him whenever we have sauteed string beans.

Marcy, Marcy, Marcy!

A while back (and it has been a while -- guess I've been distracted), I introduced you to the Joneses' only known New England ancestry, via one Ambrose Clark, whose parents John and Marcy were married in Vermont in 1810. I'll follow up on John Clark's family in the next post, but this time I'll fill you in on the knowledge we have -- sketchy and sometimes contradictory as it is -- of Ambrose's mother, Marcy Humes. She was apparently born in Douglas, Massachusetts, and moved up to Vermont with her brother, Ezra Humes. It's Marcy's family that connects by marriage to a lot of storied old New Englanders such as John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and John Alden (the Pilgrim who, as Longfellow told it, was urged to "speak for himself" by Priscilla Mullins).

Marcy's father, Samuel Humes, and her mother, Marcy Thompson, were cousins, both descended from a Thayer family that settled in Mendon, Massachusetts. Marcy Thompson's grandmother was Mercy Thayer (so I guess the name Marcy is a corruption of the very Puritan name Mercy), and Samuel Humes's mother was Martha Thayer. Mercy was the granddaughter and Martha the great-granddaughter of Ferdinando Thayer (I love that name and have no clue how a 17th-century Englishman acquired it), who emigrated from England to Braintree, Massachusetts, and was among the first settlers of Mendon. Mendon is only 40 miles from Boston, but in the 1660s it was a wilderness. The town was attacked and burned by Indians during King Philip's war in the 1670s.

(Left: a monument to the founders of Mendon, Massachusetts. Ferdinando Thayer is the first name listed.)

There is extensive documentation of more Massachusetts ancestors of Marcy's, but as I said, the various internet sources sometimes contradict themselves. Some of the trees have her ancestors going back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as early as 1634. If I can ever sort out all the contradictory claims and find some proof for the lineage, this line would be our best chance of reaching that holy grail of American genealogical snootiness, a Mayflower ancestor. But in truth, I'd rather find some Native American ancestry -- as Will Rogers said, "My ancestors didn't come over in the Mayflower; they met the boat."

Finally! We're a Persecuted Minority!

I suspect a lot of you are like me in that you never really had much of an answer to the question "What are you?" (i.e. Irish, German, etc.) Except for the dash of exotic Czech on Blanche Vermillion's mother's side--and Miles Branch's Welsh mother--I thought of my family as just a bunch of indistinct white Americans.

And I'm not alone. When confronted with the box asking for their ancestry on the 2000 census, 7.3 percent of Americans said simply "American" in 2000. While you might think that this is a widely varied group of people who didn't know any more about their ancestry (or didn't consider it the Census Bureau's business), there's actually a distinct geographical pattern to those responses. You can see it in the map above, where the counties with the greatest percentage of people answering "American" are darkest.

The shape that emerges is a map of Appalachia, a region whose first white settlers were the group known as "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish." Their real origins are in the border region between England and Scotland, though many of them lived in Northern Ireland before coming to America in the 1700s. I have slowly come to understand, with the help of a couple of good books, that the Scots-Irish were and are a very distinct cultural group--and that much of my family is part of that culture. It is a culture that overlaps with a lot of better-known segments of American society: born-again Christians, NASCAR fans, and, at least in this year's primaries, Hillary Clinton voters. (The map of the counties where she won by more than 65 percent looks a lot like the one above.) But it's also a culture that doesn't have a strong sense of itself as being different from other Americans--thus the answer to the census question.

One of the things I've learned is that the Scots-Irish culture in its early years was open to people of other nationalities who were willing to adopt its (protestant) religion and values. So even though I have found French, Dutch, and Swedish people in my backcountry ancestors, they all seem to have signed on to the Scots-Irish culture.

Cal Jones's parents were both very much of this culture. Blanche Vermillion Branch's father was, too, as was Clara Paxton Jones's father. (Her mother's family had some Scots-Irish blood, but they were part of a German-American culture that existed alongside the Mid-Atlantic Quakers.

One of the books I'd recommend if you want to know more is called Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer breaks down the migration of people from the British Isles before the revolution into four distinct cultural groups: New England Puritans, Virginia elites (and the indentured servants who came to serve them), Mid-Atlantic Quakers, and the Scots-Irish who populated the hills and backcountry. Fischer's book is written for a scholarly audience and can be slow going sometimes, but it opened my eyes to a lot of American history that I'd never understood.

And it explained some things about the people we call hillbillies or rednecks. For example, the stereotype of the hillbilly in a tumbledown shack (or more recently, the mobile home) isn't necessarily a sign of laziness: the Scots-Irish, living on the border, were constantly in the midst of war between England and Scotland, and whatever they built was sure to be destroyed. This state of war also led them to develop close affiliations with family-based clans that were allied with one side or the other: the Hatfields and McCoys were continuing a very old tradition when they were a-feudin'.

A more readable book is Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb, a U.S. Senator from Virginia. Webb is a former Marine, and his take on his Scots-Irish heritage is less scholarly and more of a celebration and a rallying cry. He wants his fellow Scots-Irish to be aware of their heritage and think and vote more like a group. He also recounts a lot of history of the Scots-Irish before they came to America, which is enlightening.

About Ambrose

Wow. It's been a really long time since my last post. It's not that I've been holding out on you; I just haven't been learning much new. But due to overwhelming demand from readers (I actually did hear from two of you!), I'm going to try to post some things that aren't new, at least to me. First up: a little exploration of my one strand of New England ancestry. As I may have said before, most of my family either emigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War or spent 300 years or more migrating across the hilly, woodsy middle of the country. The pattern is the same in several families: initial settlement in Virginia or Pennsylvania, migration into the hills of Western Virginia, Kentucky, or North Carolina, then west to Arkansas or Missouri before the Civil War. The one ancestor who traced his roots back to Puritan New England was Cal Jones's great-grandfather, Ambrose H. Clark. (That's him above.) Ambrose was the father of Cal's grandmother Esther Caroline Clark. The family legend—which I mentioned in an earlier post on the Jones family in the Civil War—holds that Cal's grandfather, Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones, met Esther when he was injured while fighting for the Union in the Civil War and was taken to Ambrose Clark's house to recover. They were the parents of Cal's father Silas Jones, the one who would ultimately be run out of Arkansas for killing a dog. (More about that here, here, and here.)

So most of what I know about Ambrose comes from an 1889 History of Northwest Arkansas published by Goodspeed Publishers. Goodspeed's books were more or less a racket. They published some history about a county or region, along with biographies of leading citizens—i.e. people who pre-ordered a copy of the book. The biographies were submitted by the subjects themselves, so Ambrose was presumably responsible for his entry. It's not that terribly long, so I'll reproduce it here:

Ambrose H. Clark, who is one of the old settlers of Arkansas, and
was first identified with the interests of Washington County in
1841, was born in Ross County. Ohio, April 28, 1818. His parents,
John and Nancy (Humes) Clark, were born in the "Green Mountain"
State, the former's birth occurring in 1783 or 1784. He died in
Dade County. Mo., in 1849 or 1850, his wife's death occurring in
Indiana in 1841. They first emigrated from their native State to
Ohio, and thence to Indiana, and then to Illinois, and afterward
to Missouri. They were members of the Christian Church, and became
the parents of eight sons and one daughter, only two of the family
now living. Ambrose H. Clark only remained at home until fourteen
years of age, and then began working on a farm in Ohio, but
afterward went to Indiana, where he lived four years, and then
came with a family, by ox team, to Arkansas. He has ever since
made his home in Washington County, where he has a good farm of
300 acres, a portion of which is under cultivation. He started out
in life with no means, but being of an ambitious and energetic
disposition, and having a true helpmate in his wife, he has
surmounted many obstacles, and can now enjoy the fruits of his
labor. His wife, who was a Miss Selina Hash, is a daughter of
Alvin Hash, one of the old settlers of Washington County, and was
born on the 20th of October, 1823. Her father and mother died in
Illinois in 1844 and 1878, respectively. Mr. and Mrs. Clark became
the parents of eleven children: Mary, Frances, Martha E., Esther.
William. John. Mestlina, Josephine, Ida, Lydia and Augustine, all
of whom reside in Washington County. One child died in infancy.
Mrs. Clark and four of her children are active members of the
Christian Church. Mr. Clark is a Republican, and takes an active
interest in all enterprises for the public weal. During the late
war, although he was not a regular soldier, he was in Price's raid
and participated in the battle of Richland. 

The New England ancestry of his parents makes Ambrose unique among my ancestors. It also helps to explain why he might have been a Republican and a supporter of the Union during the war.

Working backward from this information, various researchers have tried to place Ambrose's parents in Vermont (the "Green Mountain State" to which the biography refers). The best lead is a marriage record from Washington County, Vermont, from May 27, 1810, listing groom John Clark and bride Marcy (not Nancy) Humes. Was Nancy really Marcy? On the one hand, if we assume Ambrose supplied the information to Goodspeed, he ought to have known his mother's name. On the other hand, Goodspeed books are known to be riddled with errors, and Marcy could easily have been mistaken for Nancy in handwriting. Many of us have come to believe that this John and Marcy are in fact Ambrose's parents.

Next post: more about Marcy.

Happy 100th, Oklahoma!

Although I haven't really lived there for more than 20 years, Oklahoma is still home for me. Besides the fact that I was born and raised there and much of my family is still there, it's the one common denominator in my mongrel lineage. Oklahoma is where the daughter of a Czech immigrant and a French/Scotch-Irish horse trader met the son of English and Welsh coal miners, and it's where an orphaned English/German/Swiss/Scotch-Irish schoolteacher met a bookkeeper from the hills of Arkansas whose ancestors had been in America and inching west for 300 years.

So what parts of our family were in Oklahoma by November 16, 1907?

Clara Paxton was still an 8-year-old girl in Missouri and would not move to Oklahoma for another decade, but her grandfather Lee Overholser had lived there since the time of the Land Run, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser were living in Oklahoma City at the time. (Her brother Burton, incidentally, was born in Oklahoma City in 1896.)

Cal Jones was a 12-year-old boy whose family was probably living in Boynton, Indian Territory, on the day that it became Oklahoma. His parents Silas and Nannie had left Arkansas four years earlier.

Blanche Vermillion was seven months old, having been born in Wayne, Indian Territory, in April. She was living with her mother in Wayne, and the celebration of the new state must have been muted for them, as her father Walter Vermillion had died in September. Blanche was surrounded by cousins in the area, most of them grandchildren of George and Kate Jicha, who had settled across the river in Oklahoma Territory in the 1889 Land Run. Blanche's one living grandparent, John Washington Vermillion, also lived in the area, where he had settled as far back as '89 also.

Six generations of our family have lived in Oklahoma so far, and Clara's sons' families are on their seventh. It's probably not any kind of record, as a lot of Oklahomans reproduce more rapidly than we do. But considering our earlier family history of heading west every generation or two (always in search of farmland, something that's not so much an issue now), it's a pretty good run.

I wish I could be in Oklahoma today, but I'm there in spirit.

When Cal Went to War

Here's something I found a while back and have been meaning to post: it's Cal Jones's World War I draft registration card. (Click to enlarge.) No great surprises--I did learn what he was doing for a living in 1917, as he's listed as an oil pumper with a company called Corbin and Bradstreet (which I Googled to no avail). He enlisted on June 5, 1917, two months after the U.S. entered the war. For some reason, he (or whoever filled out the form) put down the wrong birth year--he was born in 1895, not 1896. But his age is listed correctly as 21.

I found this in an archive at Ancestry.com while I was taking advantage of a free trial there. Pretty cool. I'll try to post more documents and photos as I think of it; it's hard to find time for the longer, more encyclopedic entries, but I do like to put something up here from time to time.

Clara's Cotton Buyer

After Clara Paxton's mother and father died, she lived with a succession of relatives: her grandmother in Independence, Missouri, her uncle Charley and aunt Sue Overholser in Valley Falls, Kansas, and her uncle Will and aunt Ella Overholser in Oklahoma City. She lived with the Overholsers in the 1918-1919 school year, when she seems to have been taking courses at Central High School--probably to get some college preparation that her high school in Valley Falls had not provided. In 1919-20 she was at Hollins College in Virginia with Mary Overholser, and in 1920-21 she was back in Oklahoma City and earning her teaching certificate from what is now the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. Because the Overholsers were part of what passed for society in Oklahoma City in those days (1918-1921), Clara turned up in the newspaper from time to time: hosting a lunch for friends at the Skirvin Plaza Hotel with her cousin Mary Overholser, attending a party here and there. On Sundays, the Oklahoman's society page would feature photos of pretty and prominent young women, apparently just so everyone would know who was who.

On September 26, 1920, it was Clara's turn (see clipping at left--click to make it larger). She was one of five women included that week, and the caption began "Two ambitious students, two charming brides, and an interesting young traveler in foreign lands. Upper left--Miss Clara Paxton, niece of Mr. and Mrs. Will L. Overholser, who is striving for a degree at the Central State normal at Edmond. . . . "



















Two days after the picture appeared, a Mr. Sidney Caldwell in Duncan, Oklahoma, wrote her a letter (above--click on the pages to make them bigger). Mr. Caldwell had wisely ruled out the two brides and evidently preferred Clara to the interesting young traveler, who had just returned from Germany, and the other ambitious student, an undergrad at Cornell (unless of course he wrote to them, too.) Here's the letter in its entirety:

Duncan Okla.
Sept. 28--1920
Miss Clara Paxton
Centeral State Normal

My Dear Miss Paxton, I thought I would write you a little love letter to let you know I love you very much. I saw your picture in the Daily Oklahoman Sunday. It said that the college girls loved to receive letters from other towns and I thought I would write you a small letter to let you know I love you. If you will write me I will answer your letters.
I think you are the most beautiful girl in the world, and I don't know what you think about me. If you will send me a picture of your self, and I will send you a picture of myself. If you love cotton buyers that get a salary of $5000 a year you had better tie into me. I'm 19 and a little bit over and you look in the picture about the same age.
Don't forget to write, I must close as a wagon load of cotton is on the street.
Yours truly,
Sidney Caldwell
P.S. Be sure and write me.

I don't know what Clara thought about the letter; my guess is that she kept it because she thought it was funny (and of course a little flattering). What Mr. Caldwell had no way of knowing was that 86 years later, Clara's descendants could use the Internet to do a little fact checking on him. I found him in the 1920 census, and there seems to be some truth--well, truthiness--to what he told Clara. His FATHER is listed as a cotton buyer, but at the time of the census (January 1920), Sidney was still in high school. So perhaps he'd joined his father in business by September of that year.

So what do you think? Did Clara choose the right guy? Maybe if she'd gone with Sidney, we'd all be in the tall cotton now.

Why We're Not Razorbacks, Part III

So now you've read Cal Jones's story about his father's departure from Arkansas, and his sister Tommy's response disputing some of the details. Now, we'll look at what the Arkansas justice system had to say. Like Bill Clinton and Scooter Libby, Silas appears to have gotten himself in bigger trouble over perjury than whatever he might have done in the first place.

A few years ago, I wrote to the Washington County Courthouse in Fayetteville asking for any records they might have involving Silas Matthew Jones. They came up with one thing: a perjury indictment against Silas from November 6, 1903. The story told in the indictment doesn't directly address the killing of the dog at all, but rather some events in its aftermath.

The events in question—apparently an argument over the killing of the dog—took place on July 19, 1903. According to the sworn testimony of H.L. Robbins—that's Zode Robbins, the neighbor whose dog Silas killed—Silas "made use of violent abusive profane and insulting language towards and about one Della Carter and in her presence and hearing which language in its common acceptation was calculated to arouse to anger the said Della Carter and cause a breach of the peace." The exact words Silas is alleged to have said to Mrs. Carter? "You are a liar. I've got a rock for you. I'll hit you as quick as I would the dog."

The indictment, a hand-written document, says that four days later, Silas was in court having been charged with breach of peace. At that proceeding, under oath, he denied saying those words. The grand jury, apparently relying on the word of witnesses (more on that in a minute), decided that "in truth and fact" Silas did make that statement and that his testimony was "feloniously, willfully and corruptly false."

The cover of the indictment names the case ("State of Arkansas vs. S. M. Jones") and identifies the grand jury foreman and the witnesses. Besides Zode Robbins, the witnesses were Della Carter herself, Arizona Largent, J. Cherry, and Charlie Tunstill. I don't know how Tunstill fits in, but Cherry is identified as the justice of the peace at the original proceeding. As for the others, here's where it gets interesting.

In looking at some genealogy sources, I found out that Arizona Largent was the former Arizona Masters—not a desert golf tournament but a woman in Arkansas. She was the mother of Zode Robbins and Della Carter, who were half-siblings.

But the really funny thing is that Zode was a second cousin to Silas's wife Nannie Shumate—something that neither Cal nor Tommy had mentioned. It's possible they didn't know—or didn't remember it sixty years later. It's not a big coincidence; in their town of Durham in the 1900 census, at least a third of the residents appeared to be related to Silas and Nannie. But when Cal described the bad blood between his mother's and father's families, he wasn't kidding!

Was this indictment the paper that Cal remembered the man on the horse reading to his father? Was this what made him disappear out the back door and leave Arkansas for good? Cal says they left in the fall, which would square with the November date of the indictment.

This is all I have on the subject for now. I should say that Silas's grandchildren remember him fondly, and as a good man. The words he said to his neighbor that day—if he said them—might have been in character, or they might have been the meanest thing he ever said. I just hope that the meanest thing I ever said doesn't wind up on record in a courthouse somewhere!

Why We're Not Razorbacks, Part II

In my last post I presented Cal Jones's report on why and how his family left Arkansas. This time, here's some of his sister Tommy's response, from a letter to Cal written just a few days later. Cal and Tommy were the second and third children, respectively, of Silas and Nannie Jones. As you'll see, her account differs in some particulars--it's kind of a hillbilly "Rashomon."

Tommy writes:

Now! While we are correcting and reminiscing let me correct you! First, I don't know who told you that I said Dad ran away from Ark. I did not! Them Zode Robbins' dogs did not attack Dad, but Zode had "sicked 'em" on to a young heifer that Dad had and they tore her to pieces. (I don't remember if she died.) But anyway they had a preliminary hearing (Dad killed the dog) and old Zode and Dad's own cousin Ambrose Clark swore to a bunch of lies so Dad felt that he couldn't get a fair trial and he took out. Mamma told me this a few years ago. But I remember when Dad had some of us kids at Grandma Shumate's one night and someone came to the front door and told Uncle George something and Dad grabbed us kids and we left by the back door and ran through the orchard for home and Dad left immediately. Later he came back and I saw him go into the barn and told Mamma, so she went to the barn and came back and said I was mistaken. I was just old enough to know there was something wrong. And I remember when he met us at a campfire just out of Westville, and somewhere in my things which are stored I have the little leather bag which Grandpa Jones gave him the gold in.

The biggest difference in their accounts is why Silas killed the dog--was it self-defense or retaliation? Tommy also seems to have known more about the legal proceedings, which we'll get to in the next installment.

Why We're Not Razorbacks

At left: Silas Jones as a young man, in a photo generously provided by a Jones cousin from Arkansas. (Click to make it bigger) I'd guess that this was a little before Silas's run-in with the law, which came when he was in his early 30s.

I've been promising to get around to this post for a while: the story of how Silas Jones and his family left Arkansas. Unlike a lot of the things I've reported on this blog, this story has been part of Jones family lore for years, and Silas's son Cal wrote it all down in a letter to his sister Irma just after their mother died in 1964. I'll start in this post by quoting the relevant parts of Cal's letter. You should know that Irma was much younger than Cal, and all these events took place long before she was born. Their sister Tommy, whom he refers to in the letter, was just a year or so younger than Cal. He begins with some background, some of it touching on things I wrote about in an earlier post about the Joneses and Shumates in the Civil War.

After some initial remarks about their mother's death, Cal writes:

This letter is to set you straight on another matter which I had intended to discuss further with you but I just didn't get around to it. It was a remark you made, quoting Tommy, and I'm sending her a copy of this letter for I certainly want her mind put at ease.

A remark she had made to you about Dad being "run out" of Arkansas. This has been bugging me ever since and I want to let you know this matter just as it was, for I believe from what you said, Tommy has the thing completely out of focus, and to get you straight on this, I must go way back, even before our father was born. As you know, Grandfather Jones fought on the Union side in the Civil War, while Mama's father fought on the side of the Confederacy, both in Arkansas. Jones the Republican, Shumate the Democrat. After the War, Grandfather Jones decided he wanted to settle in Arkansas (he was from Alabama), and how he came to fight on the Union side I do not know, nor for that matter I don't know how he happened to be a Republican. But of course there have always been a few Republicans in all the Southern states.

I'll stop here just to say that Cal had part of this wrong--his Grandfather Jones (Charles Matthew "Matt" Jones) had come to Arkansas with his parents in the 1840s, when he was still a child; his family had settled there long before the War. Cal continues:

Now picture if you can a family of robust young Republican boys (the Jones Boys) growing up in a predominantly Democratic community where just about all the fathers had fought on the losing side, the Confederacy. Being the oldest son and I believe a little closer to our father than the others, I can tell you now that Dad and his brother Will, both excellent boxers and rough-and-tumble fighters, fought their way out, back to back a many a time. He told me that in their youth they usually had to double date, in order to be close together as much as possible.

At left: three of the "robust young Republican boys" in later years, from the same cousin who sent me the photo above. (Click to make it bigger.) Left to right: Will, Silas, and Edgar Jones.

Well, to cap this off, Dad went and married a girl out of a Democratic family, which spelled more trouble. That separated the brothers and they each had to go it alone, and by the way Will married a Shumate too, a cousin of Mama's. But by that time Dad and his brother had pretty well established themselves and didn't have to fight too much, but the old hatreds continued and the first year of married life he had to lick two of Mama's brothers, Johnny and George. After that they more or less left him alone but he was still quite a minority in the community.

That should be enough of the background, and now I will tell you what happened:

Yes, I guess you could say that Dad was "run out" of Arkansas, and when you hear what it was about you may smile a little, but if you have ever entertained the idea that he left because of some criminal act you can set your mind at ease.

Remember what I said about the old, persisting hatreds. Just across the road and 100 yards west of our house, toward Durham which was less than half a mile away, lived a man named Zode Robbins, one of the worst of the haters and a man whom Dad had had to quiet down a couple of times. He had two large ferocious dogs which he had trained to bark at Dad and which I'm sure he had hoped would attack him some time. When Dad went to the store or west on the road he usually rode a horse or drove a wagon, but this time he didn't. Remember I was either 7 or 8 years old, I just can't remember if it was the spring of 1903 or 1904.

I've been able to figure out it was 1903 based on court records. More on that later.

Anyway, Dad had part of his crop in and he and I were making posts for a fence, and he decided he needed a new saw and a hammer, and on the way back these dogs actually did attack him and he killed one of them with the hammer.

The whole community knew about this and there was quite a stir about it. I remember it. I remember it quite well, the conversations he and Mama had about it and naturally opinions were divided. Zode wanted Dad to pay for the dog and he wouldn't do it, so Zode went into Fayetteville and swore out a warrant for Dad's arrest. Of course I was too young to know about that, or what it meant, but I will never forget what followed. Dad and I were putting those posts in the ground when a man rode up on a beautiful chestnut colored horse. He had a fine saddle and I was impressed by that too, for we didn't have a saddle of any kind. I probably wasn't interested in the preliminary remarks, but I remember this manreading a paper to Dad while I was looking at the horse and saddle. I will never forget the last words he read from that paper "and for killing the dog." It was then that I knew Dad was in trouble, and I cut and ran to the house as fast as I could and told Mama about it. I can't remember if she was scared, but I'm sure she was, because law-abiding people are just not used to getting arrested. To cut it short, Dad and the man came on into the house and Dad told the man to wait while he got some things out of the bedroom. Well, he simply went out the back door and so far as I know, the next we heard from him he was working in the state of Washington.

Now you can smile to think how naive Dad was to think he was in real trouble over killing a dog. Even a son of a Union soldier in the deep South couldn't have been hurt too badly over that, but evidently he didn't think that way.

I started out thinking I could get it all on one sheet, but since I couldn't find a stopping place I'll just fill you in on what happened after that.

As I said Dad had started a crop. He was gone and Mama was left alone with six children, Hub was a baby. So it fell to Grand Dad Jones to look after us and see that that crop was tended. How he did it I do not know, but in the fall of 1904 we left Arkansas, and here is how that happened:

Dad had two fine teams of mules and I don't know what else, but Grand Dad Jones fixed up a covered wagon, filled it up with bed clothes, clothing, himself, a mother and six kids, plus a little wood-burning King Heater and we headed west. I remember that trip quite well, in fact I'm sure Tommy and Boy do too. Just before dark every day we would find a promising camp site and as Boy called it, we would "scamp out." Outside of the rough, jolting part of the trip, the one thing that stands out in my mind was that Mama, most of the time, had no milk to cook with. I'll never forget that gravy and those baking powder biscuits. And I remember one treat we had. Grand Dad shot a hawk and then got some milk at a farm house and we had a feast--as far as one hawk would go. I thought that was the best bread and gravy I had ever had. How long it took I don't know, but as covered wagons go, I guess we made pretty good time, alternating those two teams of big mules and most of us walking most of the time.

For the record, Google Maps tells us that by modern highways, the distance from Durham to Westville, their destination, is about 40 miles.

Then one night which seemed no different from the rest, we camped out again. Mother had done the best she could with what she had to do with and we were gathered around the camp fire eating whatever she had prepared. We looked up and there was a man coming out of the shadows. Yeah, you guessed it. It was Dad, and you can imagine what a reunion that was. We were in Indian Territory, and out of the clutches of the law, but into what was another story. I remember Dad letting me sit up with him and Grand Dad after the others had gone to sleep, and another incident was burned into my memory. Grand Dad Jones had bought our farm and he paid Dad for it right there, and I had the privilege of watching them count the money--all in $20 gold pieces, how much I never knew, out of a cloth bag.

Hay, I just thought of something. Where do you suppose you and I would be today if Dad hadn't killed that dog?

So there you have the story as told authoritatively by the eldest son. In the next post, I'll give Tommy's reply--she remembered things slightly differently, but the gist was more or less the same. After that, I'll report on what the Arkansas court records were able to tell us. But nothing else I've learned about this story can measure up to the wonderful details that Cal provided: the chestnut horse and saddle, the hawk dinner, counting out the gold pieces by the fire. I hope it'll inspire all of you to write down some family memories. People will be grateful for decades to come.

Paging Doctor Calaway

Because parts of Sherman Calaway Jones's name have been passed down to some of his descendants, I've been interested in finding out where his name came from. The name Sherman doesn't appear in the family before his birth, and I've never heard any explanation about how his parents, Silas and Nannie Jones, chose it. But since we know that his father was a Republican and the son of a Union veteran, I am inclined to believe that, despite the fact that they lived in Arkansas, Silas Jones named his first son for General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was loathed by Southerners for his destructive March to the Sea in 1864. It was just this kind of thinking that ultimately got Silas run out of Arkansas. (I'll get around to that story soon.)

So what about Calaway? Cal's daughter remembers being told that the name was in honor of a Dr. Calaway, but I've not been able to find such a person in their part of Arkansas at the end of the 19th century. But there's one other thing worthy of note: Silas Jones's grandmother, whose maiden name was Salina Hash, had a brother whose name was Alvin Calaway Hash; in his case, the name was probably in honor of his and Salina's great-grandmother Ann Calloway, who was of a line of Calloways that came from England to Virginia in the 1600s. So whether or not Silas knew it, Calaway was a family name. I hope I'll figure out where the mysterious Dr. Calaway fits in at some point. I'll let you know.

Salathiel, Jeroboam, and More

You can hit a brick wall pretty fast when you try to research a surname as common as Jones. Our Jones line disappears into Jackson County, Alabama, in the 1820s, when our ancestor William "Billy" Jones was born there. We know that Billy's father was born in South Carolina, but we do not know his name. A cousin who has been doing genealogy research for years has tried to track down Billy Jones's father, and while she's not found anything close to definite, she has found some possibilities. My favorite is a man named Salathiel Jones who lived in Jackson County at the right time, was born in South Carolina, and had a son around Billy's age. I'd love to have a Salathiel in the family, wouldn't you?

Thinking about Salathiel reminds me that there a bunch of cool and/or weird names in my family history. Here are a few favorites. Depending on which side of the family you're on, some of these may be in your tree too. Feel free to consider them if you're planning a family:

Jeroboam Howard (b. 1759): an ancestor of George Bailey Paxton on his mother's side. Jeroboam, like Salathiel, is an Old Testament name. (At left is King Jeroboam, from the first book of Kings.) Those were big in the 19th century.

Jehu Jehu: C.M. Branch's great-grandfather. There were at least three generations with this identical first name-last name combination in his mother's Welsh family.

Grizzie Riddle (1826-1876): Billy Jones's wife. The name Grizzie was not all that uncommon among the Scotch-Irish; it derived from Griselde, a name that appears in the Canterbury Tales. Still, I'll give five bucks to anyone who honors the family legacy by naming their daughter Grizzie.

Ferdinando Thayer (1625-1713): an ancestor of Cal Jones via his father's mother, the source of my only New England ancestors. Ferdinando was an early settler of Mendon, Massachusetts, and, it is said, a renowned wrestler. I don't know anything about the origin of the name, but it definitely sticks out amid a bunch of Isaacs and Thomases in the Thayer family.

Argyle Blackstone (b. 1650): also from way back in Cal Jones's grandmother's family, but from a Virginia line. This one always sounded like someone from a romance novel--kind of a Rhett Butler type, maybe.

Charity Grubb (1687-1761): an ancestor of Cal's other grandmother. The name Charity appears many times in this Quaker family, but "Charity Grubb" sounds like a name for a soup kitchen.

Johan Andersson, aka Stalkofta (1627-1685): a distant ancestor of Cal's mother. Johan came to America as part of the Swedish settlement called New Sweden (later Delaware). He became known as "Stalkofta"--or "steel coat"--among the other Swedish settlers, apparently because of his habit of wearing armor when hanging around the fort. He took the name as a surname, and it was gradually anglicized to "Stalcop," a name still seen frequently in the Southern U.S. Any of you who are unsatisfied with your current surname might consider a favorite article of apparel: "Bob Fleecepullover," maybe, or "Karen Haltertop."

Gruffydd Nannau (b. 1568): a Welsh ancestor of Clara Paxton via Levi Overholser's mother. The Welsh names always look like someone was typing with their eyes shut--and sound like something from Star Wars.

Anybody out there know some good ones I left out?

The Joneses' Civil War

At left: Charles Matthew "Matt" Jones at age 19. You can't tell from this reproduction, but he is wearing four pistols.

When I started looking into my family history, all that I knew about our family and the Civil War was that Cal Jones's grandfathers in Arkansas had fought on opposite sides. The idea of a Union soldier from Arkansas sounded so unusual that I imagined he must have been very brave or quite contrary. But the more I've read both about our family's history and the nation's, the more I've learned that the Civil War was not simply a binary, black-and-white (or Blue-and-Gray) conflict. In the mountain regions that Cal's family came from—Appalachian Virginia, Alabama, and Kentucky, Ozark Arkansas—the locals tended to be caught in the middle: possessed of none of the abolitionist zeal of the North, and yet not culturally or economically invested in the institution of slavery. (Put more plainly: Cal's people did not for the most part have slaves, but that was mostly because they couldn't afford them.)

Sherman Calaway Jones was born in 1895 near Durham, a town in Washington County, Arkansas, near Fayetteville. The area began to be settled in the 1830s by white farmers from Tennessee and Kentucky. Cal had a large extended family in the area: his four grandparents, his eight great-grandparents, and 11 of his 16 great-great-grandparents had lived in Washington County or in an adjacent county. In the 1900 census for Durham, about a third of the 700 or so residents were apparently his relatives.

Though the national origin of Cal's ancestors was varied, including England, Ireland, The Netherlands, France, Sweden, and Germany, they had assimilated into the "Scotch-Irish" culture of 18th-century immigrants from Northern Ireland and Scotland. (Some people prefer the terms "Scots-Irish" or "Ulster Scots" to "Scotch-Irish," but I use the last just because it's the most common.) The Scotch-Irish had a long history of life on the border: they had lived on the frontier between the English and the Highland Scots for centuries, their homes frequently destroyed as borders moved according to the fortunes of conflict. They learned to work both sides to their advantage and became a violent warrior culture of family clans that shifted alliances and fought among themselves. (Family feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys weren't an American invention; the Scotch-Irish brought such behavior with them.)

So when the Civil War broke out, sentiment in these mountainous border regions was divided. Although slavery was not widespread in Washington County, we are told that Cal's great-grandfather, William Shumate, had slaves that worked his 300-acre farm. (The Shumates had come from Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1837; William’s father Balis came three years later, bringing slaves with him.) Not coincidentally, it was William's son Bennett Shumate who was Cal's Confederate grandfather: he served in a Confederate Cavalry unit from 1862 to 1865. Two of Bennett’s brothers, James and William Jr., died in the war.

Cal's other grandfather, Charles Matthew (Matt) Jones, fought for the Union as a Private in Company B of the First Arkansas Cavalry Volunteers, as we know from his Civil War pension file. He enlisted on October 1, 1862, near Springfield, Missouri. He was injured in August 1863,: his horse was shot out from under him, and he himself was shot in the right side, the arm, and the right leg, probably in action north of Fayetteville.

A family legend holds that when Matt was wounded, he was brought to the home of Ambrose Clark to recover. While there, he met Ambrose's raven-haired daughter Esther, whom he would later come back and marry in May 1865, a few months before his discharge. Ambrose Clark was a native of Ohio, and his parents came from Vermont. He later identified himself as a Republican, so it is likely that he was a Union supporter.

Matt’s own family appear to have been Union supporters. He and his parents had come from the hills of northern Alabama in the 1840s. Matt’s brother John, who also fought for the Union, was killed while trying to escape after having been captured in battle. Their father, William Jones, must have at least been a strong Union supporter after the fact: his second marriage, nearly 20 years after the war, broke up because his wife was a Confederate sympathizer.

But Matt may not have been as ideologically motivated as we’d like to think: Another family legend holds that he first signed on with the Confederates and then, when the tide of the war was turning in Arkansas, he switched sides.

The guerilla violence that swept through the border regions throughout the war did not just affect soldiers. One victim, Seth Mills, an 80-year-old Quaker great-great-grandfather of Cal's, was assaulted in his home by Southern "bushwhackers" who demanded his money. When he refused, they tortured him by burning and breaking his feet. (He survived the ordeal and lived to the age of 94.)

Bennett Shumate died in 1884; it has been said that he never fully recovered from war injuries. Matt Jones lived until 1922.

For years after the war, old resentments continued, and the Union-Confederacy dispute was played out in the political arena by Republicans and Democrats. So when Bennett Shumate's daughter Nancy (known as Nannie) married Matt Jones's son Silas in 1892, the Shumates, at least, were not happy about it. As Cal Jones would later write:

“Now picture if you can a family of robust young Republican boys (the Jones boys) growing up in a predominantly Democratic community where just about all the fathers had fought on the losing side, the Confederacy. . . . I can tell you now that Dad and his brother Will [Matt Jones’s sons], both excellent boxers and rough-and-tumble fighters, fought their way out back to back many a time. . . . To cap this all off, Dad went and married a girl out of a Democratic family, which spelled more trouble. . . . By that time Dad and his brother had pretty well established themselves and didn’t have to fight too much, but the old hatreds continued and the first year of married life he had to lick two of Mama’s brothers, Johnny and George. After that they more or less left him alone, but he was still quite a minority on the community.”

Those resentments would later lead to Silas and his family leaving Arkansas after a dispute with some of Nannie's relatives over a dead dog—but that's a subject for another post. [UPDATE, 8/30/07: The story of the dog and the exodus from Arkansas is told here, here, and here.]

A word on my sources: A history of Washington County published by the Shiloh Museum in 1989 has lots of details about people in Cal's extended family. The letter of Cal's that I quote above gave me the basics of the story. And a cousin who is related on both the Shumate and Jones sides has worked for decades on family history; her impressive work filled in a lot of details and color. Finally, I learned about the cultural history of the Scotch-Irish from a terrific book called "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer breaks down the immigration from the British Isles to America into four distinct cultural groups and paints a detailed portrait of each group, providing a lens for understanding American history. It's helped me understand our family history better, too.